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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

B.C. Heroes: Rosemary Brown

Rosemary Brown speaks at a Women in the Media conference in Vancouver in 1991.

Photograph by: Denise Howard
, Vancouver Sun

Rosemary Brown — the first black woman elected to a Canadian legislature — left behind a treasury of quotes to serve as both inspiration and encouragement to her feminist sisterhood before she died in 2003.

Perhaps the most famous is the observation "... until all of us have made it, none of us have made it."

This stands alongside her "sisterhood is powerful" and "to be black and female in a society that is both racist and sexist is to be in the unique position of having nowhere to go but up," as an indication of what motivated her.

Brown was born in 1930 in Jamaica and emigrated to Canada in 1951, later attending McGill University and UBC before undertaking a career as a social worker.

An avowed feminist and socialist, she would battle for equality and human rights all her life.

She fought to remove sexism from textbooks, to increase female representation on government boards and to end discrimination based on sex or marital status.

She was a founding member of the Vancouver Status of Women Council and the Vancouver Crisis Centre.

Her political career began in 1972 with her election as an MLA for Vancouver-Burrard in B.C's first NDP government. At the time, she was a member of the board of the Status of Women, which was advocating women to seek election.

In 1975, she made an unsuccessful bid to become the national leader of the NDP, but it took four ballots for Ed Broadbent to defeat her.

Brown, a mother of three, would serve as an MLA until 1986 when she became a professor of women's studies at Simon Fraser University.

She was awarded many honours and honourary degrees for her community service and social justice work, including an Order of Canada.

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